1. Field
The present invention is in the field of computer telephony integration (CTI) and pertains more particularly to methods and apparatus for controlling the life span of interaction requests in contact centers.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of CTI telephony, contact centers exist mainly for the purpose of customer fulfillment relative to sales and service. State of the art contact centers are capable of managing communications over diverse channels including voice, messaging, and other Web-based communication such as chat, form submission, Web invitation, and link redirection, and more.
Currently, customers and potential customers of a contact center may abandon or terminate an interaction request if the request is a voice telephone request, a VoIP request, or a Web-based chat request, simply by terminating their end of the connection by hanging up or logging off the server. Such interaction abandonment occurs mainly when the customer has lost patience waiting in a queue for a response from the contact center system or agent. The option to abandon an interaction request is not available for other media channels managed by the contact center such as short messaging service (SMS), email, multimedia messaging service (MMS), or other asynchronous contact initiation methods using Web-based interfaces.
As for other multimedia interaction requests, agents may lose efficiency by processing many interaction requests where the sender is no longer interested and or has found another solution to the need defined in the original request.
Therefore what is clearly needed is a system that enables the originators of interaction requests to establish and control the time that an interaction request may be considered alive and can still be responded to by the contact center system or an agent of the contact center.